Donald Trump's two August executive orders banning TikTok and WeChat mobile apps, as well as the State Department's major foreign policy initiative on a clean Internet in the United States, are just the latest signs that the once-open global Internet is slowly being replaced by 200 separate state-controlled networks. Although these separate American, Chinese, Russian, Australian, European and other "Internet networks" have some common features with each other, political laws will gradually separate them as groups of individuals in each country lobby their interests within their own country. ... Moreover, it is likely that we will soon see the emergence of a global alternative Internet.
Part of this nationalist disintegration of the Internet was foreseen as the open / global Internet of the 1990s gradually became, by 2005, the main field of war, news, espionage, politics, propaganda, banking, commerce, entertainment, and education. The process of creating hundreds of individual national networks was slow because the Internet - a network of networks - was never intended to mark national boundaries, and because the United States was a staunch opponent of a fragmented set of national networks. Both of these conditions have changed - and they are changing rapidly.
The forerunner of the Internet, the US Department of Defense DARPANET, was designed to allow completely different computer networks (such as IBM and UNIVAC or PC and Mac) to communicate with each other through a gateway that converts the computer language of each network to a common language called Internet protocols. The genius of this concept was that computer networks were not required to use the same language ... they only needed to be converted into a common language at the gateway, which then routed data from everyone on each network to everyone on any other. And since computer networks inherently don't care what city, province, state, or country they are in, or the nationality of their human user, the technology was not designed with national boundaries in mind. This contrasts markedly with such media,like broadcasting and telecommunications, which mostly grew with the permission of national governments. Then, with government permission, the national network was interconnected with others through state-controlled technical and core arrangements.
It is important to recognize that by virtually any measure, the global Internet is controlled by businesses and non-profit organizations under the jurisdiction of the United States government. About 1,000 miles of land from San Diego to Seattle is home to most of the major Internet businesses and network and standards enforcement agencies (and those that are not located there are likely somewhere else in the United States). So, as the governments of China, Russia and Iran never tire of explaining, while Americans make up about 310 million of the world's 4.3 billion Internet users (about 8 percent) , the US government controls more than 70 percent of Internet controls and services.
It took China billions of dollars and more than ten years to demonstrate that the internal non-nationalist nature of the Internet can be controlled by both technical and legal means, which is called the "Great Firewall of China . " Without listing the wide range of methods that China has used to create “its” Internet in China, which is different from the “Internet” in the US or Europe, suffice it to say that the Internet in China is markedly different (for example, there is no Google, Facebook or Twitter).
China's ability to control the Internet within its borders between 2005 and 2018 has taught many other countries that it is possible, even if it is expensive. This lesson has not gone unnoticed by Russia, Iran, Australia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the EU and many other countries that have begun developing legal (and sometimes technical) controls on Internet content within their borders. This legal / technical nationalization has been greatly intensified over the past decade by the realization that it will actually be easy for the government to turn off the Internet on its territory.
This approach to controlling the Internet within the country's borders has been made possible in part by the proliferation of smartphones, as simply shutting down any cell tower for data transmission would shut off the Internet within the tower's signal range. As a result, for a country that could not afford the Great Firewall, it became possible to simply cut down the Internet in certain territories (India, Zimbabwe, etc.).
Thus, the initial open global nature of Internet services has gradually come under national control, either at great expense or with a cudgel. Back in 2018, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted the internet would split in two: An American-led Internet will coexist with a new Chinese-Russian-led Internet. Schmidt's prediction should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed China 's Belt and Road Initiative and its stated goal of playing a leading role in the information and communications technology world or its annual World Wide Web Conferences .
The first major step in introducing a new China-centric Internet may have been taken last year, when China introduced a new type of protocol to the UN International Telecommunications Union . It was quickly dubbed China's new IPand this has become the subject of serious controversy as countries and companies decide how to respond. Whether the new Chinese Internet is based on a series of new protocols or simply a new set of Internet domain names and numbers, it seems likely that this alternative Internet will give national governments a little more control over what happens inside their territory than the global open. The Internet. This will attract many national governments to participate - not least Russia, Iran, and possibly Turkey and India. The combined market power of these countries will make it difficult for any global internet business to avoid using such a new medium.The likely outcome is two parallel global computer systems of internetworking ... which is pretty much what Schmidt predicted.
In its day, the United States, both politically and by example, would have been a powerful force against national control of the Internet on its soil. The "free flow of information" on the Internet has been a cornerstone of US international Internet policy for decades, which was easy for Americans because almost all information on the Internet flowed from the United States to other countries. However, in 2020, there has been a dramatic shift in US international Internet politics (just as the market for American Internet companies has shifted in the past few years). As part of the US Clean Grid Initiative, the US government seeks"Prevent the storage and processing of confidential personal information of US citizens and valuable business intellectual property in cloud systems accessible to foreign adversaries . " In executive orders, the US government has proposed to prohibit TikTok and WeChat from making "... any transaction by any person or in relation to any property subject to the jurisdiction of the United States ..." .
An important approach underlying these initiatives is the strong statement by the US government that it has control over Internet content in the US. This is no different from prohibiting content on the Internet because it violates established international or national law. It is based on the assertion that national governments such as the United States have every right to choose content on the global Internet and declare certain content illegal within their borders. However, for many countries it is difficult to distinguish between China's 2014 clean-up campaignand the 2020 US Clean Web Campaign, as they both vehemently reject the old notion of “free flow of information” and instead rely on national control over content within the country.
If we are now moving towards a world of nationally controlled networks with two global gateways, it is likely that most global companies and most governments will seek to participate in both - and many end users should do the same.